Posts Tagged ‘appropriation’

Geoffry Smalley’s work is rooted in early-19th-century American painting, deriving specific scenes and techniques from historical canvases and the Hudson River School. In 1836, painter Thomas Cole completed his five-part series The Course of Empire. The series documents Cole’s vision for the birth, life, and death of western civilization, from the pastoral to the desolate. Cole had a calculated optimism for life and renewal, but[…..]

#access #discrimination #appropriation #institutions #representation #re-performance Two important events transpired in the art world last week that have brought the complications of diversity and hierarchy into sharp focus. The first is the passing of artist Elaine Sturtevant, an artist who sublimated a critique of gendered inequity among artist peers into works that appropriated and re-created works deemed significant to the canon of contemporary art. The other[…..]

#commerce #spirituality #appropriation #commodification #orientalism The third and final installment of the Asian Art Museum’s Proximities series of contemporary art exhibitions addresses Asia’s central role in networks of trade, manufacturing, and information. On the whole, this series’ focus on looking at Asia through an American lens has revealed significantly more about America and the Bay Area than about Asia. As with the first and second[…..]

John Sparagana fatigues images by manipulating them. First he scans pictures and runs off inkjet prints, then he crumples the pictures in his pocket and kneads the glossy paper for days or weeks until the sheet’s fibrous structure is loosened. The result is a soft fabric more than double in size, with its original image lightened and diminished on the new surface, appearing like a[…..]

For today’s installment of our Best of 2013 series, we have a selection from co-founder Seth Curcio, who writes, “Robert Heinecken has always lived near the top of my favorites list. So, reading this lovely review of his recent project in LA was a nice little surprise. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on how Heinecken’s work operates in today’s context—shedding light on how[…..]

Robert Heinecken is an artist who is hard to pin down. A photographer who rarely used a camera, he founded UCLA’s photography department in 1964. Skeptical of the documentarian role of photography, he mined images from mass media, prefiguring the appropriation strategies of Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine by at least a decade. Despite this, he was never able to achieve[…..]

In a time when appropriation has become seamlessly integrated into contemporary art practice, it’s not easy to provide a precise definition for such an increasingly amorphous concept. Jan Verwoert offers a robust description, calling appropriation “an intense sense of an interruption of temporal continuity, a black out of historical time that mortifies culture and turns its tropes into inanimate figures, into a objectified, commodified visual[…..]